Schism-riven Liberals still a party like it’s 1999

What happened in Hawthorn has shaken the foundations of the Liberal Party. The talk in the street is even more alarming.

Premier Daniel Andrews is treated like a conquering hero as he arrives at Parliament House in Melbourne after the elction. Picture: AAP

For the past 20 years, the gradual evolution of Glenferrie Primary School in the heart of the Melbourne state electorate of Hawthorn has told the story of a suburb on the move.

Narrowly escaping closure under the Kennett government’s swingeing cuts, it became the school that could, gently educating the offspring of thousands of mainly middle-class Victorians, parents who mostly used the campus as a feeder school to the wealthy private system.

Like the suburb, the school also has changed gradually, evolving in part on the back of the success of nearby Swinburne University, which sits on the main road that carves its way from the Yarra River, deep into the heart of conservative Melbourne. With the university came a sharp increase in the number of students from a non-English-speaking background and a subtle shift away from whitebread Australia and a heavier emphasis on social inclusion.

The society the Liberal Party was pitching to in the 1990s has changed markedly, with a curriculum heavy on accepting different cultures, a bias against intolerance, and empathy for the environment.

There is deep importance in this when considering the context of the Victorian election rout.

These children of the 1990s are now voting and their parents are less tribal and are less conservative after a seemingly endless run of growth.

You can almost taste the change in the electorate.

As local Liberal member and leadership aspirant John Pesutto faces an uphill battle to retain the seat, the electorate is being seen as the epicentre of the election earthquake.

In the context of the Liberal Party it is, but not necessarily for the reasons people may think. People have short memories.

In the 2002 “Brackslide” election in Victoria, the swings in Hawthorn were severe. The then Liberal incumbent Ted Baillieu was forced to preferences after the Greens appeared on the scene, polling nearly 20 per cent of the primary vote.

Baillieu, later to be premier, suffered a near 7 per cent two-party-preferred swing and there was clear evidence then that voting patterns were changing.

Glenferrie Road in Hawthorn. You can almost taste the change int he electorate.

Fast-forward to today and, while vote counting continues, the Greens’ primary vote has dropped slightly to about 18 per cent and Labor’s primary vote after the recheck of first preferences has reached more than 32 per cent. This Labor vote was only 1.7 points above the 2002 landslide. There was a 10.4 point slide in the Liberal primary vote this year and Labor attracted nearly a third of the primary vote, which was up eight points from 2014.

But, instructively, Labor’s vote this year is roughly the same as 1999 and 2002.

And consider that since 1999, the Liberal primary vote is down 18.5 points in Hawthorn.

What also has changed this year — and this will alarm the Liberal hierarchy — is the street conversation at the school, along Glenferrie Road and deep into the no-pub zone of Camberwell.

As a Glenferrie parent tells Inquirer: “I am a Liberal voter but not this time. Those bastards weren’t getting my vote.”

For bastards, read Liberal Party and, specifically, Canberra.

Throw into the mix a productive Labor government, much like Steve Bracks in 2002, and there has been a perfect storm of discontent that has transformed a seat, bringing the possibility of electing a 71-year-old Labor candidate who lives in a retirement home.

The 18.5 point slump in the primary vote since the Kennett election loss is what should alarm Liberals across Australia. While there are the usual caveats in analysing state versus federal election results, the long-term trend is clear.

Hawthorn, which starts next to the inner-city Labor-Greens state electorate of Richmond, also happens to be the home of the federal electorate of Kooyong, and Kooyong sits next to Higgins. Both these federal seats were held by Liberal prime ministers.

When federal Jobs and Industrial Relations Minister Kelly O’Dwyer lamented in private that her party had become homophobic, anti-woman, climate-change deniers, she was speaking as much for her own seat of Higgins as she was for the welfare of the entire government.

While many in the Liberal Party would argue against her cry about homophobia and the treatment of women, O’Dwyer was speaking in a way for the need for modernisation.

Her seat of Higgins takes in one of Australia’s biggest per capita gay communities. If the 20-year Hawthorn trend were to translate to Higgins, then she will be cooked next year or the following election, as evidenced by one opinion poll this week.

Josh Frydenberg in Kooyong would have medium-term challenges as well.

At the same time that the Liberal Party is trying to process the enormous heartland swings in key Victorian seats, the organisation must prepare itself for the looming federal election.

The federal Treasurer and other senior Victorian MPs have embarked on a strategy of trying to keep the lid on the inevitable bloodletting that some Liberals want in the wake of the election result. The first to go was Victorian president Michael Kroger in a surprise resignation last night.

The Australian’s reporting on Friday of an email from Liberal federal vice-president Karina Okotel, lamenting the Victorian election campaign outcome, was significant principally because it showed the shift in the conservative powerbase in the Victorian Liberals.

The heavily religious Okotel was once close to Kroger but that relationship now will be almost impossible to repair. The clear message is that the broad conservative grouping in the party is not at all impressed with her email.

The spin is that several key mainstream conservatives have shifted away from Okotel in part because of a concern that her policy positions are unhealthy to the Liberal brand, even if that vision has led to an increase in the party membership.

This has the potential to be highly significant for the party across the medium term as it attempts to modernise and strive for less factionalism.

The perception is that the divide is between moderates and conservatives, but in many cases the split has more to do with personalities. The feedback internally is that it is one thing to expand the party but quite another to deliver growth that destabilises the party’s fabric, even if religion and politics have always interconnected, culturally, at the very least.

Yesterday Okotel explained her email, which bagged Kroger and campaign director Nick Demiris. Kroger had been a mentor to her.

She told Sky News: “It was an emotional time after the election and it was a private email and certainly after the election I was feeling quite raw when I put my thoughts down on paper.’’

She also defended whoever leaked it to The Australian.

“It has been an emotional time so I understand that people might do things that are what they think is right at the time. I suppose there have been lots of Facebook posts going on that have then been published in the media by party members who are upset, and rightly so.’’

Meanwhile, in Hawthorn and other electorates like it across Australia, senior Liberals are trying to determine the cost of infighting as Scott Morrison faces what looks like an unwinnable election.

Already the talk is about sandbagging federal seats that otherwise would have been considered safe. For decades, Hawthorn was one of those electorates. Not now.